What are Java Streams?

Introduction to Streams API

Java Streams is a powerful feature introduced in Java 8 that allows developers to process collections of data in a functional programming style.

A stream is a sequence of elements processed in parallel or sequentially.

Streams provide a concise and expressive way to manipulate collections of data by allowing developers to define a pipeline of operations that can be performed on the elements of the stream.

The pipeline typically consists of three parts:

1. a source,
2. zero or more intermediate operations,
3. and a terminal operation.

Sketch

The source of a stream can be a collection, an array, an I/O channel, or any other data source.

Intermediate operations, such as filter(), map(), and sorted() transform and filter the elements of a stream to produce a new stream. Finally, a terminal operation, such as forEach(), reduce(), or collect(), performs a final action on the elements of the stream and produces a result.

The beauty of streams is that they allow developers to perform complex operations on collections of data in a single line of code and can easily leverage multi-core architectures for parallel processing to achieve better performance.

Note: Streams are a powerful tool for working with data collections in Java.

Learn or explore Streams API here: Streams API.